I gave a talk on Weilin Xu’s work (in collaboration with Yanjun Qi) on evading machine learning classifiers at the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York: Classifiers Under Attack, 2 November 2016.

Machine-learning models are popular in security tasks such as malware detection, network intrusion detection, and spam detection. These models can achieve extremely high accuracy on test datasets and are widely used in practice.

However, these results are for particular test datasets. Unlike other fields, security tasks involve adversaries responding to the classifier. For example, attackers may try to generate new malware deliberately designed to evade existing classifiers. This breaks the assumption of machine-learning models that the training data and the operational data share the same data distribution. As a result, it is important to consider attackers’ efforts to disrupt or evade the generated models.

David Evans provides an introduction to the techniques adversaries use to circumvent machine-learning classifiers and presents case studies of machine classifiers under attack. David then outlines methods for automatically predicting the robustness of a classifier when used in an adversarial context and techniques that may be used to harden a classifier to decrease its vulnerability to attackers.

Over the past few years, explosive growth in cryptocurrencies (especially Bitcoin), has led to tremendous excitement about blockchains as a powerful tool for just about everything. Without assuming anyprevious background in cryptography, I’ll explain the cryptographic and networking technologies that make blockchains possible, explain why people are so excited about blockchains, but why you shouldn’t believe everything you hear about them.

The slides are below (I believe a recording will also be available soon).

See the OblivC.org site for the code and data. Jack Doerner will present the paper at CCS in October.

Abstract

When a group of individuals and organizations wish to compute a stable matching — for example, when medical students are matched to medical residency programs — they often outsource the computation to a trusted arbiter to preserve the privacy of participants’ preference rankings. Secure multi-party computation presents an alternative that offers the possibility of private matching processes that do not rely on any common trusted third party. However, stable matching algorithms are computationally intensive and involve complex data-dependent memory access patterns, so they have previously been considered infeasible for execution in a secure multiparty context on non-trivial inputs.

We adapt the classic Gale-Shapley algorithm for use in such a context, and show experimentally that our modifications yield a lower asymptotic complexity and more than an order of magnitude in practical cost improvement over previous techniques. Our main insights are to design new oblivious data structures that exploit the properties of the matching algorithms. We then apply our secure computation techniques to the instability chaining algorithm of Roth and Peranson, currently in use by the National Resident Matching Program. The resulting algorithm is efficient enough to be useful at the scale required for matching medical residents nationwide, taking just over 17 hours to complete an execution simulating the 2016 NRMP match with more than 35,000 participants and 30,000 residency slots.

Great to visit our former student Joseph Calandrino at the Federal Trade Commission in DC, where he is now a Research Director.

Denis Nekipelov and I gave a joint talk there about using secure multi-party computation techniques to enable data analyses across sensitive, divided data sets in the room where the FTC commissioners meet.

I’m co-organizing a workshop to be held in conjunction with NIPS on Private Multi‑Party Machine Learning, along with Borja Balle, Aurélien Bellet, Adrià Gascón. The one-day workshop will be held Dec 9 or Dec 10 in Barcelona.

The work studies how different design choices made by web frameworks impact the security of web applications built by typical developers using those frameworks, with a goal of understanding the usability and performance trade-offs that lead frameworks to adopt insecure defaults, and develop alternatives that lead to better security without sacrificing the needs of easy initial development and deployment.

For the Symposium, I presented a tutorial introduction to secure multi-party computation (focused towards systems researchers), and an invited talk on Memory for Data-Oblivious Computation. Was a special honor to be able to speak about MPC applications build using Yao’s protocol following Andrew Yao’s opening keynote.